Manage Your Day-to-Day, Jocelyn K. Glei (Ed.)

Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, & Sharpen Your Creative Mind

 

Jocelyn K. Glei (Ed.)

Category: Nonfiction

Synopsis: A collection of essays for those employed in a creative workplace.

Date finished: 15 March 2014

Rating: ***

Comments:

Whenever you take an intellectual approach to creativity, you lose me. There are those who can analyze joy using a spreadsheet and still maintain my curiosity, but for me there is a line that, once crossed, it’s hard to get me re-engaged. That’s how I felt about this book.

I read this off and on as a secondary book. The essays are very short and lend themselves well to this sort of take-up-and-put-down reading. The writing is top-notch. And while there’s nothing banal included, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy, either. Topics include: maintaining focus, the importance of routines, the hindrance of technology, creativity, perfectionism, blocks, and self-renewal. The essays were written by top thinkers in the field. What field, you ask? I’m unsure. They seem to all be from the crossroads of where creativity meets technology. These aren’t artists, writers, and musicians. These are CEO-types who keep their toes in the creative side of life. I guess.

It sounds like I didn’t like the book. That’s not really the case. I just didn’t find it applicable to my life. I’m not tethered to an i-device, for instance. So great chunks of the book didn’t apply. But there were other gems that I picked up like learning to identify the block I’m experiencing in my work that might prove to be revolutionary. And the full-page quotes throughout were wonderful. Not the usual trite quotes that show up around high school graduation time. It’s an intelligent book with a presentation I appreciated—the layout is particularly striking.

I think with a book like this, you take what you can get. Not everything will apply to your circumstances. So, taken for what it was, I was happy.

Would you recommend this to a friend?

The right kind of creative slash mogul type will get more out of this than I did.